Neuro-linguistic programming
Neuro-linguistic programming is a pseudoscientific approach to communication, personal development, and psychotherapy that first appeared in Richard Bandler and John Grinder's book The Structure of Magic I. NLP asserts a connection between neurological processes, language, and acquired behavioral patterns, and that these can be changed to achieve specific goals in life. According to Bandler and Grinder, NLP can treat problems such as phobias, depression, tic disorders, psychosomatic illnesses, near-sightedness, allergy, the common cold, and learning disorders, often in a single session. They also say that NLP can model the skills of exceptional people, allowing anyone to acquire them.
NLP has been adopted by some hypnotherapists as well as by companies that run seminars marketed as leadership training to businesses and government agencies.
No scientific evidence supports the claims made by NLP advocates, and it has been called a pseudoscience. Scientific reviews have shown that NLP is based on outdated metaphors of the brain's inner workings that are inconsistent with current neurological theory, and that NLP contains numerous factual errors. Reviews also found that research that favored NLP contained significant methodological flaws, and that three times as many studies of a much higher quality failed to reproduce the claims made by Bandler, Grinder, and other NLP practitioners.
Early development
According to Bandler and Grinder, NLP consists of a methodology termed modeling, plus a set of techniques that they derived from its initial applications. They derived many of the fundamental techniques from the work of Virginia Satir, Milton Erickson and Fritz Perls. Bandler and Grinder also drew upon the theories of Gregory Bateson, and Noam Chomsky.Bandler and Grinder say that their methodology can codify the structure inherent to the therapeutic "magic" as performed in therapy by Perls, Satir and Erickson, and indeed inherent to any complex human activity. From that codification, they say, the structure and its activity can be learned by others. Their 1975 book, The Structure of Magic I: A Book about Language and Therapy, is intended to be a codification of the therapeutic techniques of Perls and Satir.
Bandler and Grinder say that they used their own process of modeling to model Virginia Satir so they could produce what they termed the Meta-Model, a model for gathering information and challenging a client's language and underlying thinking. They say that by challenging linguistic distortions, specifying generalizations, and recovering deleted information in the client's statements, the transformational grammar concept of surface structure yields a more complete representation of the underlying deep structure and therefore has therapeutic benefit. Also derived from Satir were anchoring, future pacing and representational systems.
In contrast, the Milton-Model—a model of the purportedly hypnotic language of Milton Erickson—was described by Bandler and Grinder as "artfully vague" and metaphoric. The Milton-Model is used in combination with the Meta-Model as a softener, to induce "trance" and to deliver indirect therapeutic suggestion.
Psychologist Jean Mercer writes that Chomsky's theories "appear to be irrelevant" to NLP. Linguist Karen Stollznow describes Bandler's and Grinder's reference to such experts as namedropping. Other than Satir, the people they cite as influences did not collaborate with Bandler or Grinder. Chomsky himself has no association with NLP, with his work being theoretical in nature and having no therapeutic element. Stollznow writes, "ther than borrowing terminology, NLP does not bear authentic resemblance to any of Chomsky's theories or philosophies—linguistic, cognitive or political."
According to André Muller Weitzenhoffer, a researcher in the field of hypnosis, "the major weakness of Bandler and Grinder's linguistic analysis is that so much of it is built upon untested hypotheses and is supported by totally inadequate data." Weitzenhoffer adds that Bandler and Grinder misuse formal logic and mathematics, redefine or misunderstand terms from the linguistics lexicon, create a scientific façade by needlessly complicating Ericksonian concepts with unfounded claims, make factual errors, and disregard or confuse concepts central to the Ericksonian approach.
More recently, Bandler has stated, "NLP is based on finding out what works and formalizing it. In order to formalize patterns I utilized everything from linguistics to holography... The models that constitute NLP are all formal models based on mathematical, logical principles such as predicate calculus and the mathematical equations underlying holography." There is no mention of the mathematics of holography nor of holography in general in Spitzer's, or Grinder's account of the development of NLP.
On the matter of the development of NLP, Grinder recollects:
The philosopher Robert Todd Carroll responded that Grinder has not understood Kuhn's text on the history and philosophy of science, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Carroll replies: individual scientists never have nor are they ever able to create paradigm shifts volitionally and Kuhn does not suggest otherwise; Kuhn's text does not contain the idea that being unqualified in a field of science is a prerequisite to producing a result that necessitates a paradigm shift in that field and The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is foremost a work of history and not an instructive text on creating paradigm shifts and such a text is not possible—extraordinary discovery is not a formulaic procedure. Carroll explains that a paradigm shift is not a planned activity, rather it is an outcome of scientific effort within the dominant paradigm that produces data that cannot be adequately accounted for within the current paradigm—hence a paradigm shift, i.e. the adoption of a new paradigm. In developing NLP, Bandler and Grinder were not responding to a paradigmatic crisis in psychology nor did they produce any data that caused a paradigmatic crisis in psychology. There is no sense in which Bandler and Grinder caused or participated in a paradigm shift. "What did Grinder and Bandler do that makes it impossible to continue doing psychology... without accepting their ideas? Nothing," argues Carroll.
Commercialization and evaluation
By the late 1970s, the human potential movement had developed into an industry and provided a market for some NLP ideas. At the center of this growth was the Esalen Institute at Big Sur, California. Perls had led numerous Gestalt therapy seminars at Esalen. Satir was an early leader and Bateson was a guest teacher. Bandler and Grinder have said that in addition to being a therapeutic method, NLP was also a study of communication and began marketing it as a business tool, writing that, "if any human being can do anything, so can you." After 150 students paid $1,000 each for a ten-day workshop in Santa Cruz, California, Bandler and Grinder gave up academic writing and started producing popular books from seminar transcripts, such as Frogs into Princes, which sold more than 270,000 copies. According to court documents relating to an intellectual property dispute between Bandler and Grinder, Bandler made more than $800,000 in 1980 from workshop and book sales.A community of psychotherapists and students began to form around Bandler and Grinder's initial works, leading to the growth and spread of NLP as a theory and practice. For example, Tony Robbins trained with Grinder and utilized a few ideas from NLP as part of his own self-help and motivational speaking programmes. Bandler led several unsuccessful efforts to exclude other parties from using NLP. Meanwhile, the rising number of practitioners and theorists led NLP to become even less uniform than it was at its foundation. Prior to the decline of NLP, scientific researchers began testing its theoretical underpinnings empirically, with research indicating a lack of empirical support for NLP's essential theories. The 1990s were characterized by fewer scientific studies evaluating the methods of NLP than the previous decade. Tomasz Witkowski attributes this to a declining interest in the debate as the result of a lack of empirical support for NLP from its proponents.
Main components and core concepts
NLP can be understood in terms of three broad components: subjectivity, consciousness, and learning.According to Bandler and Grinder, people experience the world subjectively, creating internal representations of their experiences. These representations involve the five senses and language. In other words, our conscious experiences take the form of sights, sounds, feelings, smells, and tastes. When we imagine something, recall an event, or think about the future, we utilize these same sensory systems within our minds. Furthermore it is stated that these subjective representations of experience have a discernible structure, a pattern.
Bandler and Grinder assert that behavior can be understood through these sensory-based internal representations. Behavior here includes verbal and non-verbal communication, as well as effective or adaptive behaviors and less helpful or "pathological" ones. They also assert that behavior in both the self and other people can be modified by manipulating these sense-based subjective representations.
NLP posits that consciousness can be divided into conscious and unconscious components. The part of our internal representations operating outside our direct awareness is referred to as the "unconscious mind".
Finally, NLP uses a method of learning called "modeling", designed to replicate expertise in any field. According to Bandler and Grinder, by analyzing the sequence of sensory and linguistic representations used by an expert while performing a skill, it's possible to create a mental model that can be learned by others.